It's been a while since I posted but as I was very pleased with my piece on Boris Karloff I wasn't too anxious to push it down a post anyway. The blogger known as The Kid in the Front Row is hosting a blogathon of sorts today in which everyone participating contributes a post concerning an evening they had at the movies long ago (or recently or whenever, doesn't matter). Trouble is I can't think of anything but wanted to mention it here nonetheless in case anyone who hasn't heard of it has a story they want to relate on their blog today. And I really can't think of anything, honest. I've been to the movies many, many times as we all have but for the most part it's the movies that I remember not the experience itself. For me it's more the little things that stick out, like the lady at the showing of Bridge on the River Kwai standing up at the climax and shouting at Colonel Nicholson onscreen, "They're your people! You're betraying your own people!"
Or spending most of Top Gun smoking in the lobby (you could do that back then) and then returning to my seat to have my friend Jake lean over and start to explain what happened while I was out only to be abruptly cut off by me announcing, "I don't care."
Or seeing The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D (on a double bill with It Came from Outer Space) and enjoying it more because quite spontaneously the entire audience quickly developed the habit of doing their own mock screams every time Julie Adams screamed in the movie. It started with just a couple of guys and before long we were all doing it, like an impromptu Rocky Horror crowd.
Or maybe the best one ever to my recollection, Witness, although it's definitely a case of "you had to be there" so I don't even know why I'm telling it. Anyway, I was watching it with some
friends in the student hall at college on movie night which they had only occasionally. Basically a movie would be rented and popped in a VCR and played on the big tv in the lounge (well, big by 1986 standards). Well, at the point in the movie where Harrison Ford's character of John Book is finally rising from bed after recuperating from a gunshot wound the phone in the lounge starts ringing. And it's ringer is LOUD! And the movie at this point is quiet. So there we are watching Book sit up from bed and emerge from his comatose state and this goddamn phone is ringing (which no one is bothering to get up and answer of course) totally breaking the mood, taking us out of the movie. Or so we thought. Finally, mercifully, it stops. And then, John Book speaks: "Is there a phone around here?" The whole goddamn place erupted with laughter. It was like Book was in the same room with us and was asking because he heard it ringing! It brought us right back into the movie in the strangest way possible.
So as you can see I don't have much in the way of grand personal stories to relate to about the movies, just little snippets. I remember seeing Jaws upon its release and loving every second of it. I remember seeing nudity on the big screen for the first time when I saw 10 in 1979. I remember hating Moonraker. And so it goes. But no big stories, no big remembrances, just the little things. Of course, in the end, it's the little things that matter anyway right? Right.
***************
This has been a part of the "One Night Long Ago" blogathon hosted by The Kid in the Front Row.
